D'Amato: Our strange double standard on the treatment of animals

Waterloo Region Record

A lot of people are going crazy over the Amish couple near Millbank and the way they raise dogs. But unless these protesters are vegans and never visit zoos or aquariums, they need to take a long look in the mirror.

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Menno and Viola Streicher breed dogs for sale on their property. They recently lost their licence, after the township bylaw officer and an inspector from the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals visited in the fall and found violations relating to the animals’ care.

In a followup visit, the inspectors found that the barn’s ventilation and lighting hadn’t improved. Of course it hadn’t. Most Amish, with a belief system similar to traditional Mennonites, don’t use hydro power for their barns. The Streicher barn uses only natural lighting and ventilation. The dogs are on the second floor, with fresh straw beds, and it is heated from below by a pig pen.

The Ontario Landowners Association supports the couple. Its representatives say the animals are well treated. The association leader says the fight against them is “driven by fanatics” who specifically are targeting Amish. And Kimberly Thomas of Zorra township, a self-described dog rescuer who is behind the complaints against the Streichers, says she won’t stop until every Amish-run dog kennel in Ontario is closed.

I haven’t been to the Streichers’ barn. But based on what has been reported, I don’t think this is even a blip on the scale of the terrible things that humans do to animals.

For example, I wonder why Thomas hasn’t spoken up about those huge hog farms that trap pregnant sows in cages that are intentionally built so small that they can’t even turn around? They can’t walk or root around for food. Pigs are intelligent, sentient beings and they clearly show their misery by repeatedly gnawing on the bars of their cramped prisons.

Never mind that being slaughtered for meat is itself a violent end to life. Their short life is deeply stressful. For sows imprisoned in these cages, “there’s a lot of evidence that it’s a pathological situation,” says University of Guelph animal welfare expert Tina Widowski.

I wonder, too, what Thomas thinks about restaurants and food stores that persist in offering foie gras, a food made from fatty duck liver that is produced by the appalling practice of force-feeding the ducks through tubes that are stuffed down their throats?

And I wonder what Thomas makes of the egg farms that produce the cheapest possible eggs by crowding six hens into a wire cage that measures 45 cm (18 inches) by 45 cm (18 inches)? There are tens of millions of these crates in Canada. The tips of the hens’ beaks are snipped off so that they don’t damage their own eggs.

These hens never see sunlight, flap their wings, or build nests. Every natural pleasure and way of life is taken away from them. They’re treated like machines to make food for us. But the eggs are cheaper that way than in a free-range barn. And everyone wants cheap food.

I used to take my kids to zoos and aquariums, but I’ve stopped. Once you start imagining how an animal feels, it’s pretty hard to be there. You might see a polar bear that paces all day around an enclosure that’s far too small — bears need many square kilometres of space to live a normal life — or a giraffe that dies because the Canadian climate is just too cold for it to survive. Knowing those things can really take the fun out of your day trip.

Farmers and zookeepers aren’t the problem. We, the consumers, are. We want cheap food and entertainment, and we don’t want to look at what it costs other beings. If we want to pay twice as much for our pork, farmers will happily install roomy group housing for sows where they can walk around and socialize. But it will be more expensive to produce, because the pigs will need more room. And if they can move, the pigs will burn more calories, so they will need more food.

There’s a highway billboard that says it best. An adorable little puppy is pictured side by side with an adorable little piglet. “Why love one, but eat the other?” says the caption. That’s a really important question, one that gets right to the heart of our strange double standard when it comes to animals. And it reduces the controversy over the Amish dog farm to the minor footnote that it really is.